The Internet is a global network of interconnected computers that allows individuals and organizations around the world to communicate and to share information with one another. The World Wide Web (WWW), also known as the Web, is a collection of information resources contained in documents located on individual computers around the world and is one of the fastest growing parts of the Internet. Prevalent on the Web are multimedia Web sites offering and selling goods and services to individuals and organizations, i.e. Customers. Web sites may consist of a single Web page, but typically consist of multiple interconnected and related Web pages.
Each computer or server on the Internet is assigned a unique identifier known as an Internet Protocol (IP) address. A computer or server may host one or more Web sites. IP addresses are difficult to remember so a domain name service (DNS) associates Web sites' IP addresses with their corresponding domain names. This permits a Customer to enter an easily remembered domain name into a browser, and the browser, via the DNS, locates the unique IP address and thus the location of the Web site. Another advantage of the DNS is that the Web site may move its physical location on the Internet, i.e. receive a new IP address, but by making the appropriate changes in the DNS, the Web site may still be located using the original domain name.
In certain situations, the registrant of a domain name may not want to have their personal contact information made publicly available to prevent spam, identity theft, harassment, etc. from occurring. A proxy domain name registration permits a registrant to register a domain name anonymously by requesting the proxy to use the proxy's contact information so that the contact information published in the WHOIS database (a publicly accessible database of domain names and their corresponding registrants) is that of the proxy entity.
Internet businesses, whether a large corporation or an individual, are rapidly creating Web sites to take advantage of the growing number of Customers using the Internet and Customers' increasing willingness to purchase goods and services over the Web. Web sites created by Internet businesses may be reached by millions of Internet savvy Customers, thereby allowing Internet businesses to offer their products and services to a very large pool of potential Customers.
Some Internet businesses, typically larger more sophisticated ones, may provide their own hardware, software and connections to the Internet. However, many Internet businesses either do not have the resources available or do not want to create and maintain the infrastructure necessary to host their own Web sites. To assist these Internet businesses in operating their Web sites, many companies are offering hosting services for Web sites. These hosting companies typically provide the hardware, software and electronic communication means necessary to connect multiple Internet businesses' Web sites to the Internet. A single hosting company may literally host thousands of Web sites.
An unfortunate consequence of the Internet's growth is the accompanying growth of fraud on the Internet. Fraud not only results in actual losses, but it hinders the growth of the Internet. Many potential Customers may avoid conducting business over the Internet due to their fear of being deceived or of compromising personal data.
There are many fraudulent schemes, but two types of fraud tend to be particularly worrisome for Customers. The first type of fraud involves the operator of a Web site hiding or obscuring their identity from their Customers. Basically, the operator of a Web site takes advantage of the anonymity provided by the Internet thereby making it difficult for Customers to locate and punish a fraudulent Web site operator. For example, a Web site may purport to be from a known and trusted business when the Web site is in fact operated by an unscrupulous individual. The unscrupulous individual may try to receive credit card numbers or pass off goods and services under another's trademark as part of their fraudulent scheme.
The unscrupulous individual may have inserted false information in the WHOIS database when they registered their domain name to hide their identity. This is possible because Registrars do not verify the identity of a domain name registrant at the time domain names are registered. The unscrupulous individual may also try to use a proxy domain name registration. While most proxy domain name registrations are used for legitimate purposes, unscrupulous individuals may try to use this approach to make it more difficult for Customers to learn their identity, because the proxy's contact information, and not the unscrupulous individual's contact information, is made publicly available in the WHOIS database. As a consequence, legitimate businesses that wish to use a proxy domain name registration have a particularly urgent need for assuring their Customers that their identities are known and have been verified.
The second type of fraud involves individuals intercepting confidential information, such as credit card numbers, transmitted over the Internet between a Customer and a legitimate Web site. This type of fraud is much less common and may easily be prevented by transmitting confidential information only in a sufficiently strong encrypted format.
A common method for Internet businesses to protect their Customers from these two types of fraud is to obtain a secure certificate, such as a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate, for their Web sites. A secure certificate on a Web site lets Customers know that the owner of the Web site has been verified by a trusted third party (Certificate Authority or CA) and that confidential communications with the Web site are encrypted. SSL is a protocol for transmitting private documents via the Internet. SSL protects confidential information by using a private key to encrypt data transferred over an SSL connection. Common conventional browsers, such as NETSCAPE NAVIGATOR and INTERNET EXPLORER, support the SSL protocol, and many Web sites use the protocol to obtain confidential user information from their Customers. By convention, Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) that require an SSL connection start with “https:” instead of “http:”.
When connecting to a Web site using the SSL protocol, the Customer's browser receives information regarding the CA that issued the Web site's SSL certificate. The browser may decide whether or not to trust the Web site's SSL certificate based on which CA issued the Web site's SSL certificate. If the CA is on the browser's list of trusted CAs, the browser will know that the owner of the Web site has met the trusted CA's process for receiving an SSL certificate.
A conventional process for a CA to issue an SSL certificate to a requesting Subscriber for the Subscriber's Web site is illustrated in FIGS. 1 and 2. The process starts with a Subscriber 150, typically the owner or an agent for the Web site 180, requesting hosting services from a Hosting Provider 160, typically in cooperation with an Internet Service Provider (ISP) (Step 200). The Hosting Provider 160 will typically provide the hardware and software necessary to place the Subscriber's Web Site 180 on the Internet. The Subscriber 150 may decide to request SSL services for its Web Site 180 from the Hosting Provider 160 to provide assurances to its Customers that the Subscriber 150 is who the Subscriber 150 says it is and to enable encrypted communications with the Subscriber's Customers (Step 201).
The Hosting Provider 160 generates a public and a private key for the Subscriber's Web Site 180 (Step 202). The keys, as is known in the art, are integral to encrypted communications capabilities between the Customer and Subscriber's Web site 180. The Hosting Provider 160 generates a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) which includes information regarding the public key and a distinguished name, i.e., a unique name conforming to a standardized format (Step 203). The Hosting Provider 160 transmits the CSR to the Subscriber 150 (Step 204).
Once the Subscriber 150 has the CSR, the Subscriber 150 may request an SSL certificate from a Certificate Authority 170 (CA) (Step 205) and start the process by transmitting the CSR to the CA 170 (Step 206). The CA 170 may verify the identity of the Subscriber 150 by, for examples, asking for copies of identification documents or by asking for information not publicly available regarding the Subscriber 150 (Step 207). If the identity of the Subscriber 150 was verified, the CA 170 will create and sign an electronic certificate (Step 208). The CA 170 will transmit the electronic certificate to the Subscriber 150 (Step 209) and the Subscriber 150 will transmit the certificate to the Hosting Provider (Step 210). The Hosting Provider will install and configure the certificate on the Subscriber's Web Site 180 thereby enabling the Subscriber's Web Site 180 to communicate using the SSL protocol (Step 211). The Subscriber's Web Site 180 is now SSL complaint and may be accessed by Customers desiring the extra security provided by the SSL protocol.
A third party, such as a Customer desiring to purchase goods and services from the Subscriber 150, may use a browser to access the Subscriber's SSL-compliant Web Site 180. Several steps are automatically performed by the browser without any interaction by the Customer and, in fact, the Customer may not even know the browser is performing these steps. The browser will request from the Subscriber's Web Site 180 the certificate 150, which includes the identity of the CA that issued the certificate. Browsers that support the SSL protocol have a list of trusted CAs and the browser will compare the CA that issued the certificate to the Subscriber 150 with the browser's list of trusted CAs. If no match is found, the browser may try to see if it can get a match to one of its trusted CAs by “chaining” the CA that issued the certificate to the Subscriber's Web Site.
The chaining process involves the browser looking at a first CA that issued the certificate to a second CA that in turn issued the certificate to the Subscriber's Web Site. By moving up the chain of issuing CAs the browser will attempt to eventually link up to the root CA. This process is helpful since the root CA is more likely to be on the browser's list of trusted CAs. If a match between a CA in the chain and a CA on the browser's list of trusted CAs is eventually found, the process for setting up an SSL connection may continue. If no match is found, i.e. the browser is unable to verify the owner of the Subscriber's Web Site 180 per the SSL protocol, the browser will typically display a security error to the user and ask if they would like to disconnect from the Web Site or ignore the error and continue.
The browser will need to get the public key from the Hosting Provider 160 for the Subscriber's Web Site 180. Hosting Providers freely give the public key to anybody that asks for it. The browser may also request from the CA 170 its Certificate Revocation List (CRL) to see if the Subscriber's 150 certificate has been revoked. Obviously, if the Subscriber 150 has had its certificate revoked by its CA 170, the browser may be programmed to refuse to establish an SSL link with the Subscriber's Web Site 180.
The SSL process allows the Subscriber's Web Site 180 and the Customer to authenticate each other through an established “hand-shaking” procedure and allows both to establish an encrypted connection. Various levels of encryption are known and may be used as appropriate once a connection has been made. For example, non-confidential information may not even be encrypted or may be encrypted with a simple cipher thereby conserving computer resources, while highly-confidential information, such as credit card numbers, may be encrypted with very sophisticated encryption algorithms to increase the security in the transmittal of the data.
The integrity of the system relies on the fact that the Hosting Provider 160 that hosts the Subscriber's Web Site 180 has maintained control over the private key at all times since the Hosting Provider 160 originally created both keys. This allows the Hosting Provider 160 to use known key-pair encryption technologies with a great deal of confidence in the security of the encryption process since the Hosting Provider 160 is able to insure that the Hosting Provider 160 is the only party to ever have access to the private key.
A problem with the prior art method of obtaining an SSL certificate for a Web site is that it involves a great deal of action by the Subscriber. Specifically, after the Subscriber requests hosting and SSL services from a Hosting Provider, the Subscriber must receive the CSR from the Hosting Provider and transmit the CSR to the CA and the Subscriber must receive the certificate from the CA and transmit the certificate to the Hosting Provider. If the Subscriber fails in coordinating the transmission of either the CSR or the certificate between the Hosting Provider and the CA, the Subscriber's efforts in making its Web site SSL-enabled will fail. Compounding the problem is the fact that few Subscribers are familiar with the process for obtaining an SSL certificate for their Web sites and would prefer to focus on the issues with their core business.
New systems and processes are therefore needed to prevent fraud on the Internet that overcome the limitations of current methods. Specifically, systems and processes are needed to simplify the process for a Subscriber to make its Web site SSL-enabled. SSL-enabled Web sites help fight fraud by having a trusted third party verify the identity of a Web site operator and by encrypting communications between the Subscriber's Web Site and its Customers. Using an SSL-enabled Web site is particularly important for Subscribers that have used a proxy service in registering their domain name since a proxy service makes it more difficult for Customers to verify the identity of the Web site operator on their own.